TL;DRSakana AI and China’s 360 Security launched AI tools as alternatives to Anthropic’s banned Mythos and Fable models.
Two Asian AI companies launched products this week that position themselves as alternatives to Anthropic’s suspended Mythos and Fable 5 models. Tokyo-based Sakana AI released Fugu, an orchestration model it says matches Fable 5 on key benchmarks, while Beijing cybersecurity firm 360 Security unveiled Tulongfeng, a vulnerability-discovery tool it claims can rival Mythos. Both launches arrived as the US government’s export ban on Anthropic’s most capable models entered its third week with no resolution in sight.
Sakana’s approach is unusual. Rather than training a new frontier model from scratch, it built a seven-billion-parameter orchestrator whose job is to decide which external model should handle each part of a problem. Fugu routes tasks across a pool of available models, assembling and coordinating them as a team, and the company says the result matches the performance of systems that cost orders of magnitude more to train.
Sakana was founded in 2023 by Llion Jones, a co-author of the original Transformer paper at Google, David Ha, a former Google Brain researcher, and Ren Ito, a former Japanese diplomat. The company raised $135 million in a Series B round in November 2025 at a valuation of nearly $3 billion, and its research on multi-model orchestration was presented at ICLR this spring.
